Time Running Out For Undecideds In Quebec Referendum

“My heart makes me vote yes, but reason makes me vote no,” Helene Letarte said on Sunday as she sat in the Cafe Gourmet with a look of despair in her eyes. “I have changed my mind four times already and I still cannot decide.”

Letarte is a young graphic artist who paints signs for a living in this small agricultural and industrial center in the Quebec heartland. She is also a critically important statistic, one of tens of thousands of people pegged as undecideds who will hold the fate of Quebec in their hands when they vote today in a referendum on independence.

Polls suggest that 4.8 percent to 18 percent of voters are not sure yet how they will mark their ballots in the neck-and-neck contest that has pitted the pent-up emotions of Quebec nationalism against the hard-boiled analysis of the cost of separation for both French- and English-speaking Canadians.

In the frantic closing hours of the campaign, volunteers from both the yes and no camps are scrambling to convert Letarte and others like her.

Sitting in the coffee shop, Letarte’s sister, Sylvie L. Simoneau, the president of a local trucking company who has been campaigning against separation, said, “Why break up something that may not be working all that well but can be made to work better.”

But Richard Paradis, Letarte’s friend and fellow sign painter, argued in favor of separation, articulating the pain and frustration that she shares over Canada’s refusal to accommodate Quebec nationalism.

Letarte’s two brothers, one a separatist, the other a federalist, were both trying to persuade her to vote their way. The division within her family is yet another illustration of the way this referendum has split this town of 70,000 and the province of seven million.

Neither side is counting on what pollsters call the “ballot box bonus.” As Michel Simard, of the Montreal-based Groupe Leger & Leger explained it, “Quebeckers tend to vote for certainty, not uncertainty.”

Many people have already decided to vote no, but identify themselves as undecided because “they are discreet,” said Lise Lemonde, an insurance company underwriter who is directing the local no campaign.

Yes and no headquarters are in offices about a mile from each other, each with scores of volunteers going over voter lists block by block, working the phones and even making house calls in one last effort to convert the undecideds.

Maureen Hebert, who works in the accounts department of a local company that makes heating systems, was one of those at the phones at yes headquarters on Sunday.

Until three weeks ago, she was an undecided herself, a point she skillfully capitalized on in her phone conversations.

“What really brought me around was the need to preserve the French culture,” she said in one discussion. “It’s not that I have anything against the English. My mother is English, but has lived here for 50 years, and is voting yes herself. I suddenly became convinced I had to stand up and say something to keep our culture from being swallowed by English Canada.”